Millipede - Hyrule

Millipede
Hyrule
(2008, Epicene)
File Under = My Bloody Valentine + Zelda?

The other day Wooly Mammal approached me in utter distress. You see, Wooly is taking a course on rock n’ roll history at the University of Utah and while scanning forward to see what was up next on the class syllabus, Mr. Mammal was devastated by the absence of My Bloody Valentine. I can certainly understand. Not discussing Loveless in a class spanning the history of rock is simply irresponsible. Fortunately for Wooly, Millipede, the solo alias of one Joe Davenport, is a project which rightfully honors MBV in its mission statement…MBV and Zelda. Yeah, who knew, right? This should come as welcome news to Wooly Mammal who just happens to be the biggest Zelda fanatic I know. In fact, with his credentials, he is really set up quite nicely to review this release. Unfortunately for him, this one is too good for me to pass up. I myself am a fair Zelda fan. I can definitely hold my own on the original Nintendo version (though my current copy has been out of commission for some time). However, that is about the extent of my experience. But Hyrule doesn’t really require those type of qualifiers anyway because, as it turns out, when you mix My Bloody Valentine with Zelda the results are something more akin to reverberated noise of Yellow Swans or Wzt Hearts. For those who don’t know, both of the afore mentioned FG favorites announced their demise this year making the arrival of Millipede’s Hyrule all the more welcome in order to fill the void. Released as an ultra limited edition cassette (don’t stop reading), Hyrule runs its course in five tracks that reach just passed twenty minutes. In that time frame, Davenport evokes MBV’s disheartened guitars and then distorts and layers them with devastating results. The tracks struggle constantly between downtrodden beauty and analog violence that coalesces into a marvelous whole. Hyrule is really quite marvelous (like year end time marvelous), and as long as Davenport continues to run his idea of Zelda through MBV pedals we are all in good hands. Now, there is the matter of these ultra limited cassettes (only 30). Turns out they were snatched up as soon as the were produced (and with good reason), so Mr. Davenport has graciously made Hyrule available to the rest of us, not-quite-so-geeky-but-still-pretty-geeky folk who didn’t have the inside scoop on his MBV/Zelda/cassette madness so, please, take advantage of the link below – I promise that it will be worth your time!

-Mr. Thistle

Download Hyrule